Iranian Press Pushing Govt. To Strike Israel At Haifa Port Over Scientist Assassination

 

Kayhan: Hit Haifa

kayhan.ir

In a note written by Saadullah Zarei, the Kayhan newspaper today suggested that Iran attack the port of Haifa in the occupied territories in response to the martyrdom of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh.

Fararo – Today, Kayhan newspaper, in a note written by Sadollah Zarei, suggested that Iran attack the port of Haifa in the occupied territories in response to the martyrdom of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh. 

Kayhan wrote in the memo: “If the role of the Israeli regime in the assassination of the great martyr Fakhrizadeh is proven to the Supreme National Security Council of Iran, and of course all the evidence shows this, we must necessarily strike such a blow to this regime that the issue of attacking forces or “Iranian centers, wherever they are – from Absard to Caracas – will be off the agenda of any enemy forever.”

Sadullah Zarei continued his note in Kayhan: “We have stated several times in the face of Israel that we will strike Haifa if Israel makes a mistake. Now that we can prove the role of the Zionist regime in this great martyrdom, we can operationalize this threat, but not in the sense that we will be satisfied with an operation the size of a missile we had against the Ain al-Assad military base, and not in the sense of that operation, but in the sense that “In fact, we are attacking the important port city of Haifa in such a way that, in addition to destroying the facilities, it is accompanied by heavy human casualties, so that our deterrence reaches a” safe point “.”

According to the author of Kayhan, “Iran’s reactionary action, if implemented intelligently and accurately, will definitely lead to deterrence, because the United States and the Israeli regime and its agents are by no means ready to take part in a war and military confrontation, and this is literally a war case.” “And terrorism is coming to an end in our region.”

Young man: Do not run away from under the gutters for fear of rain

But along with the analysis of the universe and the demand for a sharp reaction to the martyrdom of Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, the young newspaper affiliated with the IRGC also believes in the reaction, but with a more moderate view. “The enemy’s calculations in the assassination are that Iran is not in a position to react, and ironically this is the best time for assassination,” Abdullah Ganji, the young managing director, wrote in a note in the newspaper, criticizing Hassan Rouhani’s analysis of Fakhrizadeh’s assassination. Unfortunately, we could not change this calculation of the enemy and we changed it ourselves. Our main analysis is that the Zionists are seeking to undermine the strategic honor of “fighting in Syria rather than fighting in Hamedan and Kermanshah,” seeking security for which we have fought abroad and pushed back their infantry in the form of “insecurity.” “They should bring them inside the country and make people aware that we fought in Syria and neglected the security of our country.”

However, he believes: “One should not make a decision with hasty feelings or social pressure. We should not go in a direction that took the repentants of Karbala to the same level and wasted without a military estimate.”

According to Ganji: “On the other hand, we should not be Sultan Hussein Safavid, who placed the crown on the head of a 26-year-old man and said,” My son, God has decreed this, and we do not oppose God’s command. ” If Sultan Hussein had fought outside the fortress of Isfahan and been torn to pieces, he would now be one of the heroes of Iran and Shiism, but the amnesty caused him to surrender the government and behead all the Safavid princes in one day, two years after the handover of Mahmud Afghan government. “The king was also watching.” 

“In response to the Zionist action, we have a lot of capacity to use,” the young newspaper said. “Any analysis that silences us has broken the pride of the great and ancient nation of Iran. The pride of the Iranians is so much that it is sometimes called the ‘Empire Syndrome.’ This pride must not be broken. The condition for maintaining this pride is that “Do not run away under the gutters for fear of rain.”

State of War Between Iran and Israel

A Scorched Earth Strategy on Iran–The assassination of a top nuclear scientist isn’t about stopping a bomb — it’s about preventing diplomacy.

Iran’s Mohsen Fakhrizadeh killed by 62-person hit squad, reports say

By Lee Brown

Iranian nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh Office of the Iranian Supreme Leader via AP
The assassination of Iranian nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh was carried out by a highly trained hit squad of 62 people — pouncing in six vehicles after the local power supply was cut, according to local reports.

The killers — who Iranian officials have insisted were sent by Israel — included a team of 50 giving “logistical support” to the dirty dozen who carried out the actual ambush Friday, sources told leading Iranian journalist Mohamad Ahwaze.

All involved had “entered special training courses, as well as security and intelligence services abroad,” Ahwaze tweeted, as translated by ELINT News.

“The team knew exactly the date and course of the movement of the Fakhrizadeh protection convoy in the smallest details,” Ahwaze’s sources told him, allowing them to cut the scientist off as he went to his private villa in Absard.

Shortly before Fakhrizadeh drove through their ambush site, the team “cut off the electricity completely from this area” to slow reports of their assassination and any calls for help, the reporter said.

Fakhrizadeh was traveling in the middle of three bulletproof cars, with the killers striking after the first car entered a roundabout, the report said.

A booby-trapped Nissan was then detonated to block the car behind Fakhrizadeh — as 12 gunmen pounced on him, arriving in a Hyundai Santa Fe and four motorbikes, Ahwaze tweeted.

“After the car bomb was detonated, 12 operatives opened fire towards Fakhrizadeh’s car and the first protection vehicle,” his thread said.

“According to Iranian leaks, the leader of the assassination team took Fakhrizadeh out of his car and shot him and made sure he was killed.”

None of the hit squad were wounded or arrested during the gunbattle with the Iranian’s bodyguards, Ahwaze said.

Friday’s hit has dramatically escalated tensions between Iran and Israel, which was quickly accused of ordering the hit.

Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei vowed “definitive punishment of the perpetrators and those who ordered it.”

He called Fakhrizadeh “the country’s prominent and distinguished nuclear and defensive scientist,” and analysts have compared him to being on a par with Robert Oppenheimer, the scientist who led the U.S.′ Manhattan Project in World War II that created the atom bomb.

Left-Wing “Woke” Zealots Urge You To Disrupt Thanksgiving Dinner, By Attacking Your Family’s Beliefs

[The cancel culture hates you, your family, your God and your country…and they call themselves morally superior.]

UVA student newspaper opinion writer: ‘Stand up’ to ‘racist family’ at Thanksgiving

Benjamin Zeisloft | Pennsylvania Senior Campus Correspondent

An opinion writer for the University of Virginia student newspaper encouraged her readers to “stand up” against “racist family.”

She argues that “hateful rhetoric, conspiratorial thinking and virulent racism, xenophobia and sexism” endure in broader American society.

One student commented on the opinion article, stating that by playing along with the “policing of white progressives, we grant them a position of superiority and false sense of accomplishment.”

Emma Camp, who writes a regular opinion column for the Cavalier Daily, asserted that “white progressives must privilege their principles over personal comfort” in conversations with family during the holiday season. In order to fulfill this mandate, they “need to stand up to their racist loved ones.”

Though Trump, who Camp defines as a “proto-fascist,” who has “been defeated,” she argues that “the hateful rhetoric, conspiratorial thinking and virulent racism, xenophobia and sexism he espoused during his tenure remain deeply entrenched in American political discourse.”

“When we sit silent over our uncle’s QAnon rants or our high school friends’ xenophobic comments,” she continues, “it shows that we value our own comfort over what we know to be our ethical duty.”

She again admonishes readers to prove that their “moral principles” are more important than their “relationship with racists.”

“No matter the outcome, standing up for your principles disrupts the presumption of agreement so often assumed by bigots,” concludes Camp. “Hateful beliefs may continue — but at the very least you can make it clear that they are not welcome to at least one person at the dinner table.”

University of Virginia undergraduate Deven Upadhyay told Campus Reform that “calling white progressives to action at Thanksgiving turns social activism into a game, eliciting frivolous accusations and burning bridges with loved ones.”

“Today’s progressives have developed a savior complex that has become so sensitive, diluting the severity of real instances of xenophobia, sexism, and racism,” he added. “As this piece pins this task on white people, it seems that people of color need to be ‘saved’ by our white friends.”

Upadhyay, who is Indian-American, says that he does not “need to be saved or pandered to. By playing along with the policing of white progressives, we grant them a position of superiority and false sense of accomplishment.”

“If the purpose of activism is to make change, telling your uncle Steve he’s a white supremacist surely won’t win you a Nobel prize,” he added.

Campus Reform reached out to Camp for comment and will update this article accordingly.

Biden–How I Learned to Love the New World Order–1992

(larger version)

Trump Working Feverishly To Scuttle Biden’s Iran Peace Overtures

Israel strikes widely in Syria, sending signal of aggressive post-Trump posture

Trump ‘asked for options on strike on Iran nuclear site’

Scoop: Israeli military prepares for possibility Trump will strike Iran

While Trump considered bombing Iran, Biden ponders a new deal with it

ANI

US President-elect Joe Biden.

By John Solomou

Nicosia [Cyprus], November 23 (ANI): The New York Times reported that on November 12, US President Donald Trump asked his senior advisers to examine options for airstrikes against Iran’s main nuclear facility at Natanz. Trump convened the meeting just one day after the International Atomic Energy Agency inspectors reported a significant increase in Iran’s nuclear material.

Fortunately, Trump’s advisers persuaded him that the risks of military action against Iran are very high. Had a strike against Iran actually taken place, apart from the fact that would be a clear violation of international law, it would also have scuttled any new deal with Iran, President-elect Joe Biden is pondering.

The nuclear deal, known as Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), signed in 2015 with the United States, Germany, France, Britain, China and Russia, allows Iran to keep a stockpile of 202.8 kilograms. Inspectors reported that the stockpile increased to 2,442 kilograms, while Iran continues to enrich uranium to a purity of up to 4.5 per cent, higher than the 3.67 per cent allowed under the deal. It should be noted that low enriched uranium between 3 and 5 per cent can be used for nuclear power, but for nuclear weapons 90 per cent purity is required.

According to New York Times, Trump had to be persuaded not to order the attack by Vice President Mike Pence, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, Acting Defense Secretary Chris Miller, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Mark Milley. They pointed out that a military strike would have no basis on international law, while the UN Security Council in all probability would not approve a military action against Iran.

Iranian Government Spokesman Ali Rabiei, responding to the NY Times’ report, said that any US attack on Iran would face a “crushing” response.

Meanwhile, the US Administration announced fresh sanctions on numerous Iranian individuals, including the Intelligence Chief and a charitable foundation linked to Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Trump had withdrawn from JCPOA in May 2018 and imposed sanctions, which according to US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo cut vital and lucrative Iranian exports by some 75 per cent, denying the regime of USD 70 billion in oil. Iran continued to comply with the provisions of JCPOA until July 2019, and then started violating parts of the deal, but last January following the assassination by the US of Major General Qassem Soleimani in Baghdad, it ended all compliance with JCPOA.

As Trump was mulling over an attack on Iran, the Israelis carried out strikes in Syria on Iranian-backed militias. On 18 November, the Israeli Air Force hit targets of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards’ Quds Force and the Syrian Army in the Golan Heights and Damascus International Airport, as retaliation for the planting of explosives near an Israeli military position in the Golan Heights.

Undoubtedly, if a military attack on Iran took place during Trump’s final days in office, it would have certainly derailed Joe Biden’s stated election promise to handle Iran “the smart way” and to give the Iranian regime “a credible path back to diplomacy”.

Karim Sadjapour, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, says that as both a Senator and a Vice President Biden’s views on Iran was always realistic. “He has no illusions about the nature of the Iranian regime and the challenges it poses to US interests, but he’s also been a consistent advocate of direct dialogue with Iran…. If Tehran shows a willingness to return to the status quo ante, no questions asked, it would strengthen the argument of those in Washington who favour an immediate return to the JCPOA. But if Tehran insists on being compensated for the sanctions imposed on Iran during the Trump era, or if Iranian leaders attempt to expand their nuclear program or carry out regional provocations in an attempt to expand their nuclear programme, or carry out regional provocations in an attempt to strengthen their bargaining position or signal that they are not weak, it will have the opposite effect.”

Paul Adams, BBC diplomatic correspondent points out that Iran, which “has weathered the Trump storm, has its own demands. Officials say the removal of sanctions won’t be enough. Iran expects to be compensated for two-and-a-half years of crippling economic damage….. The JCPOA was never a bilateral affair. Its other international sponsors – Russia, China, France, the UK and Germany, plus the European Union – are all, in one way or another, invested in its future. The European sponsors, in particular, are anxious to see Washington once more committed to the deal’s success. The UK, France and Germany (the “E3″) have tried to keep the deal alive during the Trump years and could now play a role in negotiating the terms of Washington’s return. But in London, Paris and Berlin, there’s a recognition that the world has moved on and that a simple return to the original deal is unlikely.”

A deal between Biden and the Tehran government is possible but could be much more difficult if Tehran insists on demanding compensation for US withdrawal from the deal, or if Biden raises the issues of the Iranian ballistic missiles or the Tehran supported militias in the region. (ANI)

Salonpas Pain Patch–Medical/Advertising Fraud for Doctors Too Afraid To Help Their Patients

Salonpas Pain Patch

Brand Name: Absorbine Jr., Analgesic Balm Greaseless, Arthricare Cream, BENGAY Ultra, Boroleum, Castiva Cooling, Eucalyptamint, Exocaine Plus, Flex-All 454 Maximum Strength, Gordogesic, Icy Hot, Mentholatum Deep Heating, Rhuli Gel, Salonpas Pain Patch, Satogesic, Thera-Gesic–DRUGS.COM

“NONE ARE PROVEN STRONGER OR MORE EFFECTIVE”

Jewish Editor and Jewish Filmaker Brand Criticism Of Soros As “Anti-Semitism”

“Financial speculator and self-proclaimed philanthropist George Soros, during an April 15, 1993 broadcast by WNET / Thirteen TV, made a startling admission on the secret of his success. Asked by moderator Adam Smith how, in September 1992, he could have gone “eyeball to eyeball with the Bank of England,” making a fortune of $I-2 billion from the devaluation of the British pound and the Italian lira within two weeks, Soros responded: “It really started in 1944, when Hungary was occupied by the Germans, and me being Jewish, I was in danger of life …. When the Germans came in, he [Soros’s father, a prominent Budapest attorney] said, ‘This is a lawless occupation. The normal rules don’t apply. You have to forget how you behave in a normal society. This is an abnormal situation.’ And he arranged for all of us to have false papers, everybody had a different arrangement. I was adopted by an official of the ministry of agriculture, whose job was to take over Jewish properties, so I actually went with him, and we took possession of these large estates. That was my identity. So it’s a strange, very strange life.”

Moment Magazine, which was founded by Holocaust survivor Elie Wiesel, reprinted it.–SOURCE…Jews Against George Soros

How Did George Soros Break the Bank of England?

George Soros: a golem made in Britain

SOROS THE DRUG LORD

The George Soros war against tough-on-crime, law and order prosecutors

Plutocrat George Soros Backs Alinskyite Prosecutors in America’s Race to the Bottom

George Soros as Rothschild Agent

THE CURRENCY CRISIS PAST AND PRESENT–Dr. Mahathir Mohamad, Prime Minister of Malaysia

George Soros Breaks Silence on Right-Wing Conspiracies

EXCLUSIVE  Abramorama

In this exclusive clip from the new documentary “Soros,” the billionaire investor and philanthropist—and his son—address all the bizarre right-wing conspiracies involving him.

Marlow Stern  Senior Entertainment Editor

George Soros has, over the past two decades, emerged as perhaps the biggest boogeyman in not only right-wing conspiracy circles but also among the right-wing media and Republican politicians, who have increasingly mirrored their most fantasy-minded adherents. They frequently cast the 90-year-old billionaire investor and liberal philanthropist as a “puppet-master” (Glenn Beck’s actual words) sowing chaos behind the scenes

—a well-worn anti-Semitic caricature—

and credit him (without a shred of evidence, mind you) with bankrolling everything from antifa, the decentralized anti-fascist activist group, to Black Lives Matter protests.

Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) harbors a strange obsession with Soros, even falsely claiming in 2016 that he was backing John Kasich for president. In August of this year, soon-to-be-former President Trump called in to Fox & Friends and alleged that Soros was funding antifa. And just last week, former Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich went on Fox News to accuse Soros of somehow stealing the presidential election from Trump.

The new documentary Soros, directed by Jesse Dylan and available Nov. 20, examines the life of the Hungarian-born titan, from escaping the Nazis as a child to accumulating hedge fund riches and creating the grantmaking charity network Open Society Foundations. Soros also features a series of sit-down interviews with the man himself, and in one exchange—that you can see below—he finally breaks his silence on all the wacky conspiracies.

“The fact that I have become involved in so many different issues, and have taken controversial positions, is now actually working against me,” Soros says in the film.

After airing a series of Fox News clips demonizing Soros, the film then sees one of his sons, Robert Soros, chime in.

“He’s become demonized by one community because he’s synonymous with liberal causes,” offers Robert.

According to director Jesse Dylan (How High, son of Bob), these bad-faith depictions of Soros couldn’t be further from the truth.

“The work and people whom George supports strikes at the interests of authoritarians and others who unfairly control freedom and access—whether to employment, education, a way to make a living. These are the forces attacking him,” Dylan tells The Daily Beast.

He adds, “The George Soros I got to know is the calm at the center of the storm. He is modest, curious, deeply engaged with ideas and the world around him. He is always ahead of the curve, looking to tackle the big problems: whether mass incarceration or the perverse power of social media platforms. And he has a sense of humor, and a genuine optimism that individuals can make a difference even when the world looks grim.”

Premier of Malaysia Spars With Currency Dealer

By Edward A. Gargan

• Sept. 22, 1997

See the article in its original context from
September 22, 1997, Section A, Page 6Buy Reprints

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It was high noon in Hong Kong this weekend.

Like gunfighters on a dust-blown street, one of Asia’s most outspoken leaders, Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad of Malaysia, faced off against one of the world’s most formidable currency speculators, George Soros. In their holsters were weapons of oratory, currency and clout.

At stake was nothing less than Malaysia’s national prestige, the future of Southeast Asian economies and, by some accounts, the very shape of the global financial system.

Even more, the standoff pitted two worlds against one another, an Asia of growing economic might and a West convinced that free-wheeling trade — in ideas, capital and goods — is the best recipe for development.

The forum was the usually somber gathering of finance ministers, bankers and economists at the annual meeting of the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. On successive evenings, Mr. Mahathir and Mr. Soros squared off, denouncing each other in vitriolic language seldom heard in such settings.

Yet Malaysia’s economy is in crisis, its currency has collapsed and blame had to be fixed.

Lashing out at currency traders like Mr. Soros as ”morons,” Mr. Mahathir castigated them on Saturday as ”a group of ultra-rich people.”

”For them wealth must come from impoverishing others,” Mr. Mahathir said, ”from taking what others have in order to enrich themselves. Their weapon is their wealth against the poverty of others.”

While not mentioning Mr. Soros by name — although in previous comments to newspapers in Malaysia, Mr. Mahathir specifically blamed Mr. Soros for orchestrating Malaysia’s economic crisis — he told the assembled bankers and economists that Mr. Soros’s ilk had to be stopped.

”I am saying that currency trading is unnecessary, unproductive and totally immoral,” Mr. Mahathir declared. ”It should be stopped. It should be made illegal. We don’t need currency trading.”

Then tonight, before a standing-room-only crowd, Mr. Soros fired back at the Malaysian leader.

”Dr. Mahathir’s suggestion yesterday to ban currency trading is so inappropriate that it does not deserve serious consideration,” Mr. Soros said.

”Interfering with the convertibility of capital at a moment like this is a recipe for disaster. Dr. Mahathir is a menace to his own country.”

Since July, in the churning wake of the collapse of Thailand’s currency and banking system, Malaysia has foundered. Its currency, the ringgit, has plunged 20 percent against the dollar. On the heels of the tumbling ringgit, the Malaysian stock market crashed and the country’s banking system began to creak. Foreign investors fled.

For Mr. Mahathir, who has seen his country’s annual per-capita output soar from $350 to $5,000 in four decades, the assault on the ringgit smacked of a conspiracy wrought by international currency traders.

For a man who has built the world’s tallest buildings and Southeast Asia’s largest airport and who harbors visions of a glittering new capital, a high-tech corridor intended to rival Silicon Valley and immense hydroelectric dams, the economic train wreck has been an affront, to him personally and to Asia.

”We like to think big,” Mr. Mahathir said. ”But we are not going to be allowed to do this, because you don’t like us to have big ideas. It is not proper. It is impudent for us to try, or even to say we are going to do it. If we even say that when we have the money we will carry on with our big projects, you will make sure we won’t have the money by forcing the devaluation of the currency.

”If the countries of Europe and of North America can be almost uniformly prosperous, we don’t see why we cannot be allowed to be a little prosperous.”

Then tonight, 24 hours after Mr. Mahathir’s broadside against Mr. Soros, currency traders and the international financial system, Mr. Soros stood behind the same lectern and declared that the problem with Malaysia was not the world, but Mr. Mahathir himself.

”He is using me as a scapegoat to cover up his own failure,” Mr. Soros said. ”He is playing to a domestic audience, and he couldn’t get away with it if he and his ideas were subject to the discipline of an independent media inside Malaysia.”

Later, at a news conference, Mr. Soros elaborated on his comments. ”I want to express my sympathy for poor Malaysians who were hurt” by the collapse of the country’s currency and stock market, ”but not for Dr. Mahathir, because he’s responsible.”

The war of words reverberated through the cavernous conference halls, startling government officials and private bankers used to more measured language.

An Indonesian Government economist, who spoke on condition of anonymity, was angered by Mr. Mahathir’s pronouncements.

”It’s very unfortunate that we are neighbors,” the economist said. ”I know we shouldn’t interfere in other countries’ policies. But all I can say is that it was very interesting. As an economist there are things that I disagree with. But because of our good neighbor policy, I can’t really comment on his speech.”

A Malaysian banker, who also insisted that he not be quoted by name, suggested that the Prime Minister was out of touch with reality.

”There are not two ways of doing these things,” the banker said. ”We have to get our own house in order. He really hasn’t thought these things out. He’s just spouting off.”

Israeli Forces Bomb Iranians In Syria, Trump Asks For Strike Options On Iranian Nuke Sites

Trump ‘asked for options on strike on Iran nuclear site’

Israel strikes widely in Syria, sending signal of aggressive post-Trump posture

 

Israel said it was retaliating for what it called an Iranian-sponsored operation in which Syrians planted explosives near an Israeli military base.

 

Israeli soldiers on top of a Merkava Mark IV tank that deployed along the border with Syria, in Golan Heights, Israel, in 2018.picture alliance via Getty Images file

By Reuters

JERUSALEM/AMMAN — Israel launched air raids against what it called a wide range of Syrian and Iranian targets in Syria on Wednesday, sending a signal that it will pursue its policy of striking across the border despite U.S. President Donald Trump’s election defeat.

Israel said it was retaliating for what it called an Iranian-sponsored operation in which Syrians planted explosives near an Israeli military base in the occupied Golan Heights.

Israel has frequently attacked what it says are Iranian-linked targets in Syria in recent years, and stepped up such attacks over the past year in what Western intelligence sources describe as a shadow war to reduce Iran’s influence.

But Wednesday’s attacks struck a far wider range of targets than usual, and the Israeli military was more forthcoming about the details than it has been in the past, suggesting a clear intention to send a public message.

People inspecting damaged buildings following a reportedly Israeli air strike on the Syrian village of Beit Saber, southwest of the capital Damascus on 2019.SANA / AFP via Getty Images file

Trump, who lost his re-election bid on Nov. 3, has been a strong backer of Israeli military intervention against Iranian forces in Syria. President-elect Joe Biden has said he will try to revive a nuclear agreement with Iran that Trump abandoned.

The Syrian state news agency reported that three military personnel were killed and one wounded in “Israeli aggression”.

Lieutenant-Colonel Jonathan Conricus, an Israeli military spokesman, said eight targets were hit, belonging to the Syrian army or Iran’s Quds Force, in areas stretching from the Syrian-controlled side of the Golan Heights to the Damascus periphery.

They included an Iranian headquarters at Damascus international airport, a “secret military site” that hosted Iranian military delegations, and the 7th Division of the Syrian armed forces, he said. Syrian surface-to-air defenses were hit after firing at Israeli planes and missiles, Conricus said.

A former Syrian military commander told Reuters the attacks also targeted a base of the Iranian-backed Lebanese Shi’ite group Hezbollah in Syria close to the Lebanese border, alongside bases in the southern Damascus area and outposts in the Syrian-controlled Golan Heights where Hezbollah has a presence.

Conricus made no mention of Hezbollah targets.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, a war monitor, said at least ten people were killed including five Iranians from the elite Quds Force, as well as at least two Shi’ite militiamen who may have been Lebanese or Iraqi. A commander in an alliance of regional forces backing Damascus denied there were Iranians or Lebanese among the casualties.

Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s government has never publicly acknowledged that there are Iranian forces operating on his behalf in Syria’s civil war, saying Tehran only has military advisors on the ground.

Western intelligence sources say Israeli strikes this year have undermined Iran’s extensive military power in Syria without triggering a major increase in hostilities.

Reuters

Biden’s Stupidity

Comedians Tried to Warn You of Biden’s Stupidity – Get to Know The Puppet

Trump’s New Sec/Def Aims To End Perpetual War, Biden Sec/Def Speaks of War On Russia

Michele Flournoy, Biden Sec/Def Nominee–(SEE: The Looming US War on Russia )

Trump’s New Defense Secretary Signals Troop Drawdown Ahead: ‘All Wars Must End’

National Counterterrorism Center Director Christopher Miller testifies before a House Committee on Homeland Security hearing on ‘worldwide threats to the homeland’ on Sept. 17, 2020. President Trump named him acting secretary of defense on Nov. 9, 2020. (Chip Somodevilla/Pool via AP)

Special to McClatchy Washington Bureau | By Tara Copp and Michael Wilner

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump’s new defense secretary signaled to the military in a late Friday message that he may be there to carry out one of the president’s early campaign promises, an overseas drawdown of forces in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“This is the critical phase in which we transition our efforts from a leadership to supporting role,” acting Defense Secretary Chris Miller said in a memo obtained by McClatchy. “We are not a people of perpetual war — it is the antithesis of everything for which we stand and for which our ancestors fought. All wars must end.”

Trump in a tweet Monday had announced Miller as the replacement for fired Defense Secretary Mark Esper.

In the memo to the Defense Department workforce, Miller described at length the respect he has for the institution and the sacrifices made by thousands of men and women who have deployed to the Middle East since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. He said,

“ending wars requires compromise and partnership. We met the challenge; we gave it our all. Now, it’s time to come home.”

It was the first indication of what direction the Pentagon may take in Trump’s final weeks in office, the uncertainty of which has raised concerns among career defense officials and the incoming Biden administration about what the changes mean — whether he is rewarding loyalists or trying to force through policies the department has resisted over the last four years.

Top Biden transition officials said that postelection upheaval at the Defense Department, Trump’s firing of Esper and the resignations of top defense policy and intelligence chiefs that followed, amount to a final push to politicize the military.

The firings and resignations come amid Trump’s refusal to acknowledge his electoral defeat and authorize the federal government to begin preparing for a transition of power to President-elect Joe Biden. The defense officials and Biden’s team said that gap could increase security risks for the country.

“In the 9-11 Commission report, one of the things they talked about was the impact of the delay of the transition period on our national security,” Jen Psaki, a spokeswoman for the Biden transition team, told reporters on a call Friday.

“Of course it’s of concern to see the upheaval. It should be of concern to anybody because there shouldn’t be a politicization of the military,” said Psaki, who previously served in the Obama administration.

The firing and quick replacement of Esper had worried longtime defense civilian staffers, who wondered if there are major policy changes — such as a rapid withdrawal from Afghanistan or new counterterrorism action in the Middle East or the Sahel, or even a potential use of military forces on U.S. soil to contest the election results — on the horizon before the president departs.

“I don’t know what the end game is,” said one current defense official who worked with policy staff members at the Office of the Secretary of Defense during Trump’s time in office. “For me that’s probably the most difficult thing to try and figure out. The instability and uncertainty complicates things.”

“They aren’t letting us talk about transition,” another current defense official said.

A White House spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment on the changes.

“It’s helpful to decapitate the senior civilian leadership at the Pentagon in preparation of some aggressive use of the military to bolster the president’s claims that he has won this election,” said one former defense official who has stayed close to the Pentagon’s current uniformed senior leadership. “That is probably the most worrisome, most extreme reason they could be making these decisions,” the official said.

“Then the other extreme — which is also possible, in fact some people think it’s the most likely, which is that this is just about score settling,” the official said.

“Once you got rid of Esper the decks were cleared to get rid of these other people that didn’t pass the loyalty test, and replace them with people that could use the experience over the next 70 days to pad their resume.”

In the last four years, the Pentagon has pushed back on decisions that senior military leaders hoped they could counsel the president to amend, such as the creation of the Space Force, withdrawal from Afghanistan and Syria and the use of military force to quell protests.

Each pushback has come at a cost.

Now-retired Air Force Gen. David Goldfein’s public resistance to creating a Space Force, over cost and bureaucracy concerns, is widely believed to be one of the reasons Trump did not select him to be Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Former Defense Secretary James Mattis irked Trump by convincing him not to withdraw troops from Afghanistan in 2017, and ultimately resigned over Trump’s announcement that U.S. forces in Syria would depart in late 2018.

Esper fell out of favor with Trump when he pushed back on the use of active duty forces to counter nationwide protests following the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis police custody.

“I don’t see what the legal order would be for the military to get involved in something that had to do with the elections,” said retired Marine Corps Maj. Gen. Arnold Punaro, who has assisted new administrations with Senate confirmations since the late 1990s.

Withdrawal of U.S. military forces from Afghanistan or Germany, where the U.S. military has thousands of troops based, is much more likely to be the reason for the recent changes, Punaro said.

“There are certain things the president can do without the Congress. One is to deploy troops, two he can bring troops home,” Punaro said. “Troop levels in various locations is the most logical thing he could change with most recent changes in personnel.”

Punaro, like the former defense official, also said it was more likely some of these last-minute replacements were about rewarding staff that have remained in Trump’s favor.

“It really depends on the billet or the person,” Punaro said. “Allowing people a chance to have a significant position, for example they are bringing in some people in the chief management officer’s office, a new deputy chief management officer.”

“There’s some other people coming in,” Punaro said. “These aren’t related to bring(ing) the troops home from Afghanistan or (to) settle scores. These are really positions that have been vacant where they are giving people opportunities to serve perhaps only 70 days.”

After Esper was replaced by Miller, the following changes were also made at the Defense Department:

James Anderson, acting under secretary of defense for policy, was replaced by Anthony Tata, who Trump previously sought for the position. Tata, at that time, was unable to get Senate confirmation due to inflammatory remarks he has made about Muslims and former President Barack Obama. Tata will serve as “performing the duties of” the under secretary role, which will result in some limits to his authorities.

Retired Navy Vice Adm. Joseph Kernan, under secretary of defense for intelligence and security, was replaced by Ezra Cohen-Watnick, an early administration hire by former national security adviser retired Air Force Gen. Michael Flynn, before Flynn was replaced by retired Army Gen. H.R. McMaster.

Esper’s chief of staff, Jen Stewart, was replaced with Kash Patel, who previously worked for Rep. Devin Nunes, R-Calif., on the Senate Intelligence Committee and assisted the Republican efforts on the committee to question the credibility of FBI agents investigating Russian election interference.

This article is written by Tara Copp and Michael Wilner from Special to McClatchy Washington Bureau and was legally licensed via the Tribune Content Agency through the Industry Dive publisher network. Please direct all licensing questions to legal@industrydive.com.

Celebrity Elites vs “basket of deplorables”

The Biden Family: Corruption and media suppression that will fuel a civil war

President Trump, declassify everything, expose the swamp’s dual justice system and bureaucratic terrorists

 

Mitchell Feierstein

60 million Americans have lost faith in their electoral process and their trust in government. The majority of Americans are disgusted by politicians, the government and the media telling them what to think while force-feeding them a steady diet of propaganda, lies, and excuses.

New York: The US Justice Department (DOJ) is responsible for ensuring the integrity of federal elections. Accordingly, A.G. Barr has launched a probe into “substantial allegations” of election fraud. Barr’s memorandum for US attorneys stated: “The DOJ must ensure federal elections are conducted in such a way that the American people can have full confidence in their electoral process and government.”

This memo lacks credibility, it is another paper tiger. 60 million Americans have lost faith in their electoral process and their trust in government. Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. The US government is rife with systemic fraud and corruption. The majority of Americans are disgusted by politicians, the government and the media telling them what to think while force-feeding them a steady diet of propaganda, lies, and excuses. Citizens need to believe in the integrity of America’s elections and equal application of the rule of law.

Many view Barr’s recent memo as another time-wasting, paper-shuffling “fake investigation” similar to the investigations into Crooked Hillary or the USA’s corrupt FBI. A FISA judge recently determined that FBI agents falsified and lied to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court to obtain FISA warrants to illegally and “secretly spy” on the 2016 Trump campaign and American citizens. Additionally, recently declassified documents prove that Hillary Clinton funded the fraudulent “Steele dossier,” which was the FBI’s basis for obtaining the FISA warrants and would lead to the seditious Mueller investigation.

Mueller’s hoax was part of the FBI’s “insurance policy” to remove a democratically elected President and was one of many failed coup d’états to remove Trump initiated by the Democratic Party. The head of the FBI, James Comey, signed off on many of the FISA applications, attesting to their accuracy. Comey lied about the content in warrants and lied under oath, but Comey was never prosecuted. In 2016, Comey exonerated Hillary Clinton even though there was clear evidence proving that Clinton lied about illegally moving classified documents onto a non-secure unauthorized server in the basement of Clinton’s Chappaqua, NY home. Clinton’s above the law status illustrates to Americans that the dual justice system is real—one rule for Republicans and another for the political elites in the Democratic Party.

Inspector General Horowitz, of the United States Department of Justice, launched an investigation into the FISA abuses and the Russia probe. Horowitz’s 476-page report, which took years, determined that: “Malfeasance and misfeasance detailed in the Inspector General’s report reflects a clear abuse of the FISA process by FBI officials.” It was discovered that the FBI failed “to include exculpatory evidence in its four successful applications for surveillance warrants” and had relied heavily on 17 “significant inaccuracies and omissions.”

In other words, the FBI lied to get FISA warrants that “unlawfully authorized” the FBI to conduct “electronic surveillance and physical searches.” Horowitz’s report was a “slow-roll cover-up” that resulted in nothing except the eroding of the public’s trust in government.

For nearly two years, John Durham, the United States Attorney for the District of Connecticut, has been investigating the origin of the specious Russia collusion hoax that marred the Trump presidency and split the country apart. Laws were broken, but nothing was done and Durham just sat on his investigation into the investigators. Sorry, A.G. Barr, the Durham investigation is viewed by many Americans as yet another in a long series of paper shuffles by Washington’s swamp to protect the status quo and Obama’s legacy. Barack Obama, the most divisive President in US history, never departed Washington. Obama was the first US President to champion a “resistance movement” undermining a smooth transition of power to the Trump administration. It appears that Obama is the marionettist behind Joe Biden and Kamala Harris. Obama campaigning in Georgia, on behalf of the Democratic Party Senate candidates, between now and the January runoff elections will further confirm Obama’s involvement to permanently change Americas norms and values.

During the 2020 elections, voting irregularities, software “glitches” or “mistakes” all benefited the Democratic Party enough so that the vote was likely shifted to ensure a Biden victory. All of these anomalies together are a statistical impossibility. The issues below need to be addressed before all the legal votes are counted and the results are codified:

1. As Joe Biden surrogates, the oligarchs of Silicon Valley spent billions of dollars on censorship and vote suppression campaigns that influenced the election’s outcome. Google, Facebook and Twitter censored the fact that Hunter Biden received millions from Moscow, Ukraine, and China and the fact that witnesses testified about influence peddling and that Joe Biden knew about Hunter’s activities. Big tech worked with the media to censor President Trump and to not report on systemic election fraud. Silicon Valley and the media continue to tyrannically censor evidence and facts that illustrate voter fraud or anyone that dares question the “rigged” electoral process. Big tech censorship is the greatest existential threat to free speech, liberty, and democratic principals in our lifetime. Silicon Valley amplified the voter suppression that played a critical role in the 2020 election results.

2. The pollsters and media suppressed the electoral vote, raised money for Democratic candidates and manipulated the outcome. The media ran 95% anti-Trump messaging, which seemed to justify that fraud was acceptable if it would remove “Orange Man Bad” from the White House.

3. Media hysteria over Covid-19 including Dr Fauci and the experts spewing “a science” mantra, massively boosted Biden’s election chances. It is now clear that the media used Covid-19 as a tool to instil fear in the masses. The case numbers were grossly overinflated, as were the projected number of deaths.

4. It is a fact that dead people not only registered to vote but also voted. The New York Times falsely declared in bold headline in all caps: ELECTION OFFICALS NATIONWIDE FIND NO FRAUD. Translation: Shut-up and obey! This lie illustrates why the media has lost the trust of the people.

5. Many votes were cast illegally—a fact the Democratic Georgia Secretary of State openly admitted after the election.

6. In Michigan, a “too close to call” swing state, a clerk found that software used in 47 counties moved 6,000 Republican votes to the Democrats. This software was used across the country and may have changed the election result.

7. Democratic political operatives in the Pennsylvania usurped the US Constitution by illegally changing election laws, to favour the Democratic Party, by fiat instead of by a legitimate, lawful and transparent legislative process.

8. Without due process or an investigation, a heavily biased media anointed Joe Biden President-elect. Joe Biden was trotted out, making spurious claims that American voters had “delivered us a clear victory, a convincing victory”. Biden’s “victory” was prematurely trumpeted by a shrill, corrupt and dishonest media when many questions need to be answered before any of the results are certified.

Election 2020 did not demonstrate free and fair elections. More than 70% of Republicans do not trust that US elections were free and fair, with 78% saying mail-in voting led to fraud. Mail-in ballot fraud, lack of voter identification, or signature matching are red flags that indicate malfeasance. This is how the NSA and CIA conducted electoral manipulation to install the USA’s leader of choice in “banana republics.”

While Joe Biden pretends the Democratic Party seeks unity, many of his party members, such as New York Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC), begun “archiving” an extensive communist-style blacklist of “Trump sycophants” who shall be held responsible for their “complicity”. A “cancel culture” will hold you responsible! Executions? Cancelled from any employment and sent to re-education camps, modelled after China’s Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region, for having a differing view from AOC’s utopian democratic socialism? Indeed, “Owned by China” Joe Biden will turn a blind eye. Bill Clinton’s former Labour Secretary Robert Reich, who is now the chancellor of Public Policy Berkeley, stated: “When Trump nightmare is over, we need a Truth and Reconciliation Commission.” Naming everyone “whose greed and cowardice enabled this catastrophe”. Reich and AOC’s incendiary rhetoric stands against every American norm, value, and the rule of law. These tyrannical ideas lay out precisely the agenda of the Democratic Party: re-write the US Constitution and rule for life, which will end in a very bloody civil war. Jack Dorsey’s Twitter proudly displays many threats to democratic principles like the examples above.

“The world should be horrified that Congress, Democratic Party members, and media have called for a blacklist and to purge polite society of all political opposition—this is fascism.’

To reiterate and conclude: A.G. Barr’s memo talks about the DOJ’s obligation to ensure that people can have full confidence in their government. That’s gone; that ship has sailed. The US electoral process has lost its integrity. The Obama and Clinton orchestrated “resistance” comparing Trump to Hitler, rogue intelligence operatives initiating smear campaigns on everything Trump and a concerted campaign of dirty tricks from Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer’s Democrats for over four years have polarized and irreparably damaged the country. The Democrats even failed to denounce the murders, looting, arson and shootings committed by the “defund-the-police” BLM and Antifa mob-rule thugs because they knew this chaos would instil fear in Americans and help influence the outcome of the election. Over 75 million Americans sharply rebuked the race, gender and sexual orientation-based identity politics branded by the far-left “Democratic Socialists”, who are Marxist revolutionary insurgents self-identifying as “progressives” wishing to turn the US into Wokistan.

President Trump has the legal authority to immediately declassify all the documents exposing the bureaucratic terrorists who have infested our government and institutions. Hillary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” will no longer sit back and accept these lies. This week, massive boycotts have been threatened, and truck drivers across the nation will walk out. While Washington controls the swamp and the media live in a coastal echo chamber with Hollywood’s preachy shill actors, the country’s “basket of deplorables” has full control over its supply chains and logistics—food, toilet paper, etc.

This is how civil wars begin; we all should fear for the Republic—unfortunately, it may be lost.

Mitchell Feierstein is CEO Glacier Environmental Fund.

Not An Election, But A “Democratic” Coup d’Etat

The Biden Family: Corruption and media suppression that will fuel a civil war

Mitchell Feierstein

Image credit: Mitch FeiErstein

The majority of Americans believe in the US Constitution, family values, and the rule of law. Unfortunately, forty years of neoliberal politics and academic indoctrination have spawned a movement of entitled, spoiled, social justice warriors (SJWs) claiming to be diverse, tolerant, accepting and inclusive. Once someone disagrees with these SJWs’ ideological viewpoints, the SJWs become violent, intolerant fascists.

In the epic 2020 presidential election, expect the unexpected. Expect Herculean internet content manipulation by Google, Facebook and Twitter to censor and suppress information in order to shape a favourable opinion of a heavily compromised Joe Biden. The Democratic Party, the media, rogue intelligence operatives, Wall Street, Hollywood, Ivy League neoliberal academics and the Silicon Valley aristocracy all loathe Trump. They will stop at nothing to ensure a Biden victory.

MEDIA LIES AND MALPRACTICE: DEMOCRACY DIES IN DARKNESS

The US Senate has verified that the Biden corruption scandal is not Russian disinformation; it is real. Biden insider-turned-whistleblower, Tony Bobulinski, submitted thousands of pages into evidence that included direct testimony, financial records, text messages, emails, documents and audio recordings. The Senate has confirmed Bobulinski’s evidence as genuine. Bobulinski’s evidence makes it crystal clear that Joe Biden had direct knowledge of the Biden family’s ongoing, decades-long, worldwide influence-peddling scheme, which Biden lied to America about.

Washington Post columnist Thomas Rid published a heads-up for all media: “We must treat the Hunter Biden leaks as if they were a foreign intelligence operation—even if they probably aren’t.” Rid shows how the liberal media have irreparably breached public trust. The ongoing media cover-up of the Biden scandal and their failure to report evidence-based disclosures confirmed by the US Senate is unbelievable. Not a single liberal media outlet has covered the biggest political scandal during our lifetime. Journalistic objectivity has become politically motivated, biased and deceitful propaganda churned out by political activists.

Many of the documents and emails entered into evidence, with metadata, were written by Hunter and Jim Biden and prove how and where the Biden family was selling influence to many countries. Twitter, Facebook and Google have also censored the news pertaining to the Bidens. In recent testimony before Congress, Twitter boss Jack Dorsey supported news censorship by mob-rule. He stated, “We rely on people calling it out.” These companies are censoring news and lying to the American people to protect a compromised presidential candidate. Can the public ever trust the media or government agencies again? No.

These media “activists” are involved in the corruption rather than reporting on it or presenting facts that allow the people to draw their own conclusions. These political activists and social media companies are deciding what the people can see, what will be censored and finally, under the guidance of intelligence operatives, what they can think. Stanford communications professor emeritus Ted Glasser even advocates journalists embrace “social justice” activism over objectivity. Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, et al, have become nothing more than “woke” censors and wholesale merchants in propaganda that perfectly replicate China’s social credit system.

PROGRESSIVE THOUGHT: SOCIAL JUSTICE WARRIORS

The majority of Americans believe in the US Constitution, family values, and the rule of law. Unfortunately, forty years of neoliberal politics and academic indoctrination have spawned a movement of entitled, spoiled, social justice warriors (SJWs) claiming to be diverse, tolerant, accepting and inclusive.

Once someone disagrees with these SJWs’ ideological viewpoints, the SJWs become violent, intolerant fascists. These historically ignorant, entitled, indoctrinated children are demanding, by violence if necessary, a “regressive” and discriminatory new world order that prioritizes the characteristics of race, gender and class above a life history of achievement, merit and excellence.

Joe Biden-supporting, Black Lives Matter (BLM) and Anti-Fascists (ANTIFA) members have sparked a violent crime wave across America for the past eight months. These thugs murdered innocent people; looted and destroyed businesses; and burnt buildings, vehicles and police stations to the ground—anarchy that was hidden from the public view and covered up by a complicit media. As the CNN film rolled and buildings burned in the background, the CNN talking head described the ongoing murders, arson and looting as “peaceful protests”.

DEMOCRATIC PLATFORM AND NEW WORLD ORDER

For the first time in history, presidential candidates have refused to disclose the platform they are running to lead America.

Here are the main points of the Joe Biden/Kamala Harris platform:

• End the filibuster rule in the US Senate.
• Grant DC and Puerto Rico statehood in order to appoint four liberal US Senators.
• Abolish the Electoral College.
• Pack the Supreme Court and the federal courts with “radicals in robes”.
• Allow minors and illegal aliens the right to vote.

The five bullet points above will destroy the balance of power the US founders created within the US Constitution. The US Constitution was designed to limit government powers to protect the people from partisan politics when the government is controlled by one political party. As outlined in the US Constitution, the federal government has a mechanism of checks and balances that includes three branches of government: the Judiciary, the Legislature and the Executive.

The Democratic Party’s platform will destroy this balance and install a permanent oligarchy. The Democratic Party wants to delegitimize all existing systems, customs and norms. They believe that the US Constitution needs to be shredded because old white men wrote it. In the past year, well-funded movements, such as BLM, have sprung up to help realize this goal. BLM is run by Marxists demanding an end to the nuclear family and that the police be defunded or entirely abolished. Kamala Harris, Joe Biden and the radical Democrats continuously repeat the mantra that America’s police and law enforcement need to be “re-imagined”, but they refuse to elaborate on what this actually means.

Mob-rule demands acceptance, submission and obedience to BLM. If total compliance is not immediate, you are deemed a racist and preyed upon by the mob. Mob-rule, intimidation, violence and fear are tools Biden-supporting ANTIFA members deploy to pressure and coerce the public into submission.

RED VS BLUE: PARLOUR ROOM POLARIZATION

Amy Coney Barrett, one of the most qualified jurists for a seat on the Supreme Court in decades, was formally sworn in as the Supreme Court’s ninth justice this week after the Senate confirmed her appointment by a vote of 48-52. The Democratic Party was apoplectic over Justice Barrett’s appointment even though Justice Barrett’s extensive vetting by the US Senate was 100% compliant with the privileges and rights guaranteed a sitting US President under the US Constitution.

Although Barrett was qualified for the vacant seat, every Democratic Party member voted against Barrett. Why? The Democratic Party places politics and power over the interests of the people and democracy.

Democratic Senator Cory Booker decried the process as delegitimate and a sham. Booker is an example of the contempt the Democrats in the US Senate have for the US Constitution. The Democrats’ lies, propaganda and material misrepresentations are intended to build a foundation for delegitimizing the US Constitution should Biden be elected. Democratic Senator Ed Markey called the “judicial originalism” espoused by Barrett “racist, sexist, homophobic and a fancy word for discrimination”. In other words, Markey is inferring the US Constitution is racist. Markey should be censured and forced to apologise for his repugnant comments.

Markey, Booker, and the Democrats believe the courts should be a super-legislature that rubber stamp their “social justice” ideological framework into flexible laws. This is pure demagoguery. The Democratic Party wants to tear up the US Constitution, do away with any system of checks and balances, tear down all historical statues, end traditional family values and norms, and burn down the judicial system. If Biden and the Bolshevik left seize power, the protections provided under the US Constitution and the rule of law will fade away, and the Bolsheviks will rule “Biden’s banana republic”.

This ideological war has fomented a genuine and irreparable distrust of our government agencies’ ability to protect, serve and represent the people who elected them. Never has the western media colluded to perpetrate an endless series of lies on this magnitude to cover up rampant political corruption; it is the most significant political corruption scandal and cover-up ever. These are crimes against democracy.

If you are not frightened by all of this, you should be.

ELECTION 2020 PREDICTIONS

On election day, Trump will melt the snowflakes on his way to 270+ Electoral College votes; I predict that Trump wins enough of the following states: Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, Michigan, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, to provide him enough of a boost, 125 votes, to launch him above 270 votes and a victory. Bear in mind, a Washington DC coup d’état cabal has been conducting, with impunity, a seditious conspiracy to overthrow the United States government for the past four years. It’s a safe bet this same cabal will invent ballots, lie, cheat, steal and do “whatever it takes” to dispute or overturn a legitimate Trump victory.

 

Mitchell Feierstein is CEO Glacier Environmental Fund.

Trump’s Syrian Envoy Admits Sabotaging President’s Directive In Syrian Occupation

Outgoing Syria Envoy Admits Hiding US Troop Numbers; Praises Trump’s Mideast Record

‘We were always playing shell games,’ says Amb. Jim Jeffrey, who also gives advice to President-elect Biden.

Amb. James Jeffrey, special representative for Syria Engagement and special envoy to the Global Coalition to Defeat Islamic State, speaks during a news conference at the State Department in Washington, Thursday, Nov. 14, 2019. AP PHOTO/SUSAN WALSH

BY KATIE BO WILLIAMS

SENIOR NATIONAL SECURITY CORRESPONDENT

Four years after signing the now-infamous “Never Trump” letter condemning then-presidential candidate Donald Trump as a danger to America, retiring diplomat Jim Jeffrey is recommending that the incoming Biden administration stick with Trump’s foreign policy in the Middle East.

But even as he praises the president’s support of what he describes as a successful “realpolitik” approach to the region, he acknowledges that his team routinely misled senior leaders about troop levels in Syria.

“We were always playing shell games to not make clear to our leadership how many troops we had there,” Jeffrey said in an interview. The actual number of troops in northeast Syria is “a lot more than” the roughly two hundred troops Trump initially agreed to leave there in 2019.

Trump’s abruptly-announced withdrawal of U.S. troops from Syria remains perhaps the single-most controversial foreign policy move during his first years in office, and for Jeffrey, “the most controversial thing in my fifty years in government.” The order, first handed down in December 2018, led to the resignation of former Defense Secretary Jim Mattis. It catapulted Jeffrey, then Trump’s special envoy for Syria, into the role of special envoy in the counter-ISIS fight when it sparked the protest resignation of his predecessor, Brett McGurk.

For Jeffrey, the incident was far less cut-and-dry — but it is ultimately a success story that ended with U.S. troops still operating in Syria, denying Russian and Syrian territorial gains and preventing ISIS remnants from reconstituting.

In 2018 and again in October of 2019, when Trump repeated the withdrawal order, the president boasted that ISIS was “defeated.” But each time, the president was convinced to leave a residual force in Syria and the fight continued.

“What Syria withdrawal? There was never a Syria withdrawal,” Jeffrey said. “When the situation in northeast Syria had been fairly stable after we defeated ISIS, [Trump] was inclined to pull out. In each case, we then decided to come up with five better arguments for why we needed to stay. And we succeeded both times. That’s the story.”

Officially, Trump last year agreed to keep several hundred U.S. troops — somewhere between 200 and 400, according to varying reports at the time — stationed in northeast Syria to “secure” oil fields held by the United States’ Kurdish allies in the fight against ISIS. It is generally accepted that the actual number is now higher than that — anonymous officials put the number at about 900 today — but the precise figure is classified and remains unknown even, it appears, to members of Trump’s administration keen to end the so-called “forever wars.”

As he exits public service again, Jeffrey is hardly derisive of the divisive president.

The career ambassador’s 2018 decision to serve in the Trump administration despite his political opposition to the president — and to champion his policies on the way out the door — is on-brand for an official described by colleagues as the consummate apolitical public servant. Jeffrey offers no polemics on the president’s character, even as he says he stands by his decision to sign the 2016 open letter that said Trump was “erratic” and “acts impetuously.”

“I know what I did in 2016, I do not disagree with that,” said Jeffrey, a former U.S. ambassador to Iraq. “I was following closely the situation with Iran, Iraq and Syria, and I was appalled that we didn’t have a more coherent policy. This wasn’t a political decision.”

Jeffrey now says that Trump’s “modest” and transactional approach to the Middle East has yielded a more stable region than either of his predecessors’ more transformational policies. President George W. Bush’s 2003 State of the Union speech heralding the seismic U.S. intervention into Iraq and President Barack Obama’s 2009 speech in Cairo proclaiming a “new beginning” with the Muslim world represent an approach to the Middle East that “made things worse” and “weakened us,” Jeffrey said. Trump’s administration, he said, has looked at the Middle East through a geostrategic lens and kept its focus on Iran, Russia, and China, while keeping the metastatic “disease” of Islamist terror in check.

Jeffrey believes Trump has achieved a kind of political and military “stalemate” in a number of different cold and hot conflicts, producing a situation that is about the best any administration could hope for in such a messy, volatile region.

In much of Syria, the remaining U.S. troops maintain a fragile stability. Although U.S. diplomats are still painstakingly working to resettle thousands of ISIS families and relocate foreign fighters still held by the Kurdish-led SDF, Jeffrey said the humanitarian situation is slowly improving and he has no concerns that the remaining detained ISIS fighters will escape.

In Iraq, Jeffrey credits the Trump administration with maintaining relations with the central government and constraining Iranian influence in Baghdad.

“Stalemale and blocking advances and containing is not a bad thing,” Jeffrey said. “That’s what powerful countries — France, Britain, the United States — failed to do in the 1930s, and then they discovered they had to fight for their lives in really important places like Paris and the South China Sea and North Africa.”

“That’s the nature of realpolitik and great power foreign policy.”

Jeffrey’s is an unorthodox view of Trump’s foreign policy, to be sure. It comes at a moment when most mainstream national security professionals of both parties — including some former members of Trump’s own administration — are openly condemning the president’s handling of America’s military and diplomatic affairs. In particular, critics say the 45th president has damaged American alliances, perhaps irreversibly, with his combative Twitter account and occasionally punitive foreign policy. In one key example, Trump announced a troop withdrawal from Germany because Berlin wasn’t meeting defense spending benchmarks.

Jeffrey said there’s no question that Trump has demanded a lot of U.S. allies, both in Europe and the Middle East. But he rolls his eyes at the notion that U.S. alliances will crumble under the pressure from the United States to do things like pay more for their own national defense or do more to push back on Iran.

Far from undermining Middle East allies, Jeffrey said, Trump has sought “to build up our alliance system and basically stop nagging at them, show that Washington has their back including their domestic situations — they can do pretty much what they want, but they’re going to have to step up and do things.”

In the Middle East, he said, that approach has won him friends, not enemies. He points to the historic political tightening between Israel and some of the Gulf monarchies.

“Nobody really wants to see President Trump go, among all our allies [in the Middle East],” he said. “The truth is President Trump and his policies are quite popular among all of our popular states in the region. Name me one that’s not happy.”

In Iraq, he said, relations with Baghdad have remained healthy, even as he confirmed the State Department threat to shutter the embassy if Iraq didn’t do more to curtail Iranian militia activity.

“That’s an ongoing issue,” he said. “It was not a bogus threat, it’s very serious.”

The Syria withdrawal announcement was roundly condemned even by members of Trump’s own administration as an abandonment of the SDF, which did the bulk of the on-the-ground fighting against ISIS. It is often held up by critics as the ultimate object lesson of the chaos — and even cruelty — of the Trump administration.

Jeffrey disputes the charge that the United States “abandoned” its Kurdish allies to a Turkish onslaught. Although the United States gave the Kurds a military guarantee against Russian mercenaries operating in Syria, the Syrian government and ISIS, “nobody in Washington ever gave the Kurds a military guarantee against Turkey,” Jeffrey said. “I cannot put my finger on it, [but] every Kurdish leader I know thinks that he or she was given such a guarantee by people in the field, and that had an impact on how they behaved including how they behaved vis-a-vis the Turks. So it was a very complicated political mess.”

Jeffrey doesn’t dispute that there was some chaos to the decision-making process. But he compared it to troop level fluctuations in Iraq under Bush, or Obama’s surge into and simultaneous withdrawal deadline in Afghanistan.

“Look, there’s a surface chaos to every administration,” he said. “I’m not defending this gang, I’m just saying chaos is what I’ve experienced.”

If Jeffrey is complimentary of the Trump administration’s overall approach to the Middle East, he is equally sanguine about the incoming Biden administration.

“If [U.S. allies in the Middle East] had to pick somebody else to come, it would be Joe Biden,” Jeffrey said. “I can’t predict how Joe Biden would act [but] of all of his decisions that I was involved in, and there were many, he is more of a transactional guy by his nature.

“I can’t see him giving either the Bush speech or the Cairo speech. And that’s a good thing.”

Asked how he would advise the Biden administration when it takes over his portfolio, Jeffrey said he would urge the President-elect to stay the course laid out by Trump’s team. Some things the Biden team may want to undo — like the dismantling of the Iran nuclear deal — he suggests may now be impossible. But above all, don’t attempt “transformation.” Don’t try to “turn Syria into Denmark.” Stalemate is stability.

“I think the stalemate we’ve put together is a step forward and I would advocate it,” Jeffrey said.

“I’m just telling you the reality as I saw it. I’m not trying to do favors to anybody. Because it’s very important when the new team comes in, they don’t say, if it was made by Trump it has to be bad.”

Trump Led A Voting Bloc of 70 Million Anti-Elitists

[The following article from Spiked really nails this past election and its true meaning.  It has not really been a contest between right and left, Dem. and Repub., or even Pro-Trump vs Anti-Trump…it has been a contest between America’s two classes, the hard-working lower classes (of all skin colors) against the ruling class elites and their fawning celebrity forces.  If Trump had not come along when he did there would have been someone else to lead the anti-politically correct Americans.  Hillary called us the “Deplorables”, members of a vast right-wing conspiracy, but that was just her snobbery speaking.  The following article tears into the elitists and their technocracy, speaking with power of a reenergized movement of over 70 million anti-elitist voters, the second-highest vote total of any bloc in American history.  The fact that at least 70 million of us still reject the non-stop brainwashing that has convinced many of our own friends and family that Trump was Hitler and we are the new Hitler’s army.  
This is dead wrong.  The Deplorables have risen-up from their own power to say NO to the cancel culture in their mob rule and their war against history otherwise known as political correctness.]

The real resistance

The 70million people who voted for Trump are revolting against the new elites.

BRENDAN O’NEILL
EDITOR

So Joe Biden has won the highest popular vote in the history of the US. At the time of writing, more than 73million people have voted for him. He has beaten the record set by Barack Obama who was swept to power on that famous wave of ‘HOPE’ and 69.5million votes in 2008. But here’s the thing: so has Donald Trump. Trump might be trailing Biden in the popular vote of 2020, but he, too, has beaten Obama’s 2008 record. Trump, at the time of writing, has 69.7million votes. So he has won the second-highest popular vote in the history of the American republic. That is remarkable. Far more remarkable than Biden’s very impressive count.

Why? For one simple reason. Trump is the man we’re all meant to hate. He has been raged against ceaselessly by the cultural elites for the past four years. Hardly any of the American media backed him in 2020. Globalist institutions loathe him. Academia, the media elites, the social-media oligarchies, the celebrity set and other hugely influential sectors have branded him a 21st-century Hitler and insisted that only a ‘white supremacist’ could countenance voting for him. He’s the butt of every sniffy East Coast joke and the target of every fiery street protest. He’s the worst thing to happen to Western politics in decades, we’re told, by clever people, constantly.

And yet around 70million Americans voted for him. The second-highest electoral bloc in the history of the US put their cross next to the name of a man who over the past four years has been turned by the political clerisy into the embodiment of evil.

That is what makes the vote for Trump so striking, and so important. Because what it speaks to is the existence of vast numbers of people who are outside of the purview of the cultural elites. People who have developed some kind of immunity to the cultural supremacy of the ‘woke’ worldview so intensely mainstreamed by the political and media sets in recent years. People who are more than content to defy the diktats of the supposedly right-thinking elites and cast their ballots in a way that they think best tallies with their political, social and class interests. People who, no doubt to varying degrees, are at least sceptical towards the narratives of identitarianism, racial doom-mongering, climate-change hysteria and all the pronouns nonsense that have become dominant among political and cultural influencers, and which are essentially the new ideology of the ruling class.

Hillary Clinton infamously referred to many Trump supporters as ‘the deplorables’. But a far better word for them would be ‘the unconquerables’. These are minds and hearts uncolonised by the new orthodoxies. Seventy million people in a peaceful state of revolt against the new establishment and its eccentric, authoritarian ideologies. This is the most important story of the US election and it deserves serious attention.

‘We must lance the boil of cancel culture’–SPIKED

The fury of the elites in the wake of the US election is palpable, and at times visceral. Even though their man is highly likely to have won, they are incandescent. Already there is rage against the innate racism and ‘white supremacy’ of the throng. Already there is neo-racist disgust with the Latinos and black people who, in larger numbers than 2016, voted for Trump. ‘We are surrounded by racists’, said New York Times columnist Charles M Blow, capturing the sense of siege felt by the woke clerisy. This rage of the elites against the masses, despite the victory of the elites’ preferred candidate, suggests they instinctively recognise their failure to bring significant sections of the masses to heel. They splutter out terms like ‘racist’ and ‘white supremacist’ as reprimands against the millions who refuse to take the knee to their politics of fear, politics of identity, and politics of cancellation and control.

The elites, despite probably getting their way with a Biden presidency, have been thrown by this election. First, because they called it so wrongly. Their predictions of a ‘blue wave’ did not materialise. Their polls and punditry insisting that Trumpism would be resoundingly defeated turned out to be catastrophically incorrect. The stories of a 10-point swing to Biden evaporated upon contact with reality. So far, Trump has increased his vote by seven million.

The elite’s wrongness about this election is itself a crushing confirmation of their failure to ideologically domesticate large numbers of Americans. Many Americans have clearly chosen not to communicate their beliefs to pollsters, a key part of the new political clerisy, because they are aware that the political elites hold them in contempt. As one election analyst said, because of the ‘degree of hate’ directed to Trump supporters ‘by nearly all the media’, we have a situation where ‘people didn’t necessarily want to admit to pollsters who they were supporting’. Not only do many Americans refuse to embrace the new orthodoxies of the uniformly anti-Trump cultural elites, but they also refuse to engage honestly with the cultural elites. They know it’s a waste of time. That is the size of the moral and political chasm that now exists between the guardians of correct-thought and millions of ordinary people.

The second reason this election has rattled the seeming victors – the pro-Biden establishment – is because of who voted for Trump. Exit polls suggest there were significant shifts of black and Latino voters to Trump. It is reported that 18 per cent of black men voted for Trump, up from the five per cent who voted for John McCain in 2008 and the 11 per cent who voted for Mitt Romney in 2012. A shift of this kind towards a politician relentlessly described as a ‘white supremacist’ is very significant. According to the AP VoteCast, 35 per cent of Latinos seem to have voted for Trump. And a whopping 59 per cent of Native Hawaiians and 52 per cent of Native Americans and Alaska Natives opted for Trump. Seemingly these First Nation peoples didn’t get the NYT, SNL, DNC message that Trump is a racist who hates all non-white people.

As we should expect from the neo-racialists of the identitarian elites, there is already fierce denunciation of minority groups who voted for Trump. They have sold out to ‘white supremacy’, woke academics and columnists claim. Blow writes in the NYT that the Latino and black shift towards Trump is proof of the ‘power of the white patriarchy’ and the influence it has even over oppressed racial groups: ‘Some people who have been historically oppressed will stand with their oppressors.’ That’s a lot of words to say ‘Uncle Tom’. The anger with Latinos and blacks who voted for Trump is motivated by a view of these people as racial deviants, as traitors to their race. In the rigid worldview of the identitarian elites, people are not individuals or members of an economic class – they are mere manifestations of race and ethnicity and they must conform to that role. That many voters have clearly bristled at such racial fatalism is a very positive development. Identity politics was dealt a blow in this election, and the elites know it.

More striking still is the educational divide in terms of who voted for Biden and Trump. A majority of people whose educational level is high school or less voted for Trump, while a majority of college graduates voted for Biden. Among white voters, the educational divide is even more stark. Majorities of white men voted for Trump, but among white men who didn’t go to college 64 per cent voted for Trump, while among white men who did go to college it was only 52 per cent. Meanwhile, 60 per cent of white women who didn’t go to college voted for Trump, whereas 59 per cent of white women who did go to college voted for Biden.

The educational divide is telling. Naturally, some observers claim it is proof that clever people primarily vote for Biden while dumb people prefer Trump. In truth, this split is primarily reflective of the key role universities now play as communicators of the new orthodoxies. In recent years, universities in the Anglosphere have gone from being citadels of intellectual consideration and experimentation to being factories of woke indoctrination. From critical race theory to genderfluidity, from the view of American history as one crime after another to the myopic policing of speech – including conversational speech in the form of ‘microaggressions’ – universities have become important transmitters of the ideologies of the new elites. As a consequence, one of the great ironies of our time is that it is those who have not attended a university who seem better able to think independently and to resist the coercions of elite-decreed correct-thought.

The ideas that hold on a university campus – that men can become women, that offensive people must be ‘cancelled’, that complimenting a woman on her hair is a racial microaggression, that describing America as a ‘melting pot’ is a denial of people’s ‘racial essence’, as UCLA has claimed – hold no sway whatsoever in the factories, delivery centres, mess rooms or bars of vast swathes of America. That university-educated and non-university-educated people now think so differently is testament, not to uneducated people’s stupidity, but to the transformation of universities into machines for socialising young adults into the ways and creeds of the removed new elites.

Indeed, the split of Biden and Trump voters on issues is striking, too. Of the voters who think the economy and jobs is the most important issue, the vast majority are Trump supporters: 81 per cent compared with just 16 per cent of Biden supporters. Of the voters who think racism is the most important issue, 78 per cent were Biden supporters and just 19 per cent were Trump supporters. And of the voters who think climate change is the most important issue, 86 per cent were Biden supporters and just 11 per cent were Trump supporters. On Covid, 83 per cent of Biden supporters said it is ‘not under control at all’, while just 15 per cent of Trump voters said the same thing.

This is incredibly revealing. On issues that are central to the clerisy’s worldview – the idea that racism in America is as bad as ever, that the climate is heating uncontrollably, that Covid poses an existential challenge to the future of the nation – Trump voters deviate consistently from the elite narrative. That isn’t to say that they don’t think climate change or racism are problems we must address – I’m sure majorities of them do. But they clearly reject the fatalism and dominance of these issues in the body politic. They clearly balk at the ceaseless discussions of America’s inescapable racism and the idea that if Americans do not radically alter their lifestyles then they will fry in the heat-death of climate catastrophe. They push back, in their thoughts and their votes, against the identitarianism and apocalypticism of the new elites. And they do so even on issues for which you can be cancelled for disagreeing. Try going on to a campus and saying that racism and climate change are not major issues for the US. You would be finished. But not in other parts of America. There, free discussion, or at least free thought, appears still to reign.

One study, published in the Journal of Social and Political Psychology after the 2016 election, described the widespread support for Trump among working-class or less-educated communities in particular as a form of ‘cultural deviance’. The study used over-psychologised language to describe people’s voting behaviour, but it hit on an important point: the evidence suggests that Trump-voting for many people was a form of ‘cultural deviance… [from] the salience of restrictive communication norms’. In short, the Trump phenomenon represents a revolt against the cultural supremacy of political correctness and its cancellation of any views or beliefs that are judged to be problematic. Trump became a vehicle for those who don’t agree that America is broken or racist, or that climate change will kill us all, or that identitarian correctness is more important than the economy and jobs, or that Trump is Hitler – things it is increasingly difficult to say in a polite society so feverishly policed by the new elites.

Perhaps the most important act of ‘cultural deviance’ carried out by the millions who chose Trump over Biden is their attempt to re-elevate class over identity. This is why the shift of working-class blacks and Latinos towards Trump is so important. It is also why Trump voters’ overwhelming belief that the economy and jobs is the most important issue in the US right now – in contrast with very small numbers of Biden voters who think the same thing – is so relevant. What we have witnessed in the US is a reassertion of the importance of class over identity, of the shared social and economic interests of a significant section of society over the narrow cultural obsessions of the new elites and their supporters in the new knowledge industries. The emerging populist coalition of working-class blacks, Latinos and non-university whites is a quiet revolt against the stranglehold that the upper middle-class elites have over the political narrative, and against the elites’ self-conscious promotion of the neoliberal myopia of identity and their diminution of the importance of class.

This is another reason why the elites are so furious in the wake of their own predicted election victory. It’s the key reason, in fact. Because they instinctively recognise that the economic concerns, and, more importantly, the economic consciousness, of substantial sections of society pose a threat to their ideological dominance. Witness the sneer, the naked contempt, with which the phrase ‘economic populism’ has been uttered by Biden-backing observers in recent days. ‘Economic populism’ is a cover for racism, our moral superiors insist. They dread nothing more than the re-emergence of a more class-based politics because they know it would run entirely counter, politically, morally and economically, to the divide-and-rule identitarianism they have cultivated in recent decades.

Corporations, academia, the education system, the Democratic establishment, the media elites and the social-media oligarchies are heavily invested in the cult of identity because it is a means through which they can renew their economic dominance over society and exercise moral authority over the masses. Identitarianism has provided spiritual renewal for the capitalist elites, new means of rebuking and censuring the workforce in corporations, and a sense of purpose for a political class utterly adrift from the working masses it might once have sought to appeal to. And they are not about to let some uppity blacks and Latinos and uneducated whites disrupt this new ruling-class ideology with their vulgar concerns about the economy and jobs.

Trump has lost. But so has the anti-Trump establishment. In some ways, the establishment’s loss is far more significant. These elites see in the 70million people who disobediently, flagrantly voted for ‘evil’, and who question the doom and divisiveness and censure of the new elites, a genuine mass threat to their right to rule and their self-serving ideologies. And they are right to. For these unconquerables, these teeming millions who have not been captured by the new orthodoxies, are proof that populism will survive Trump’s fall and that the self-protecting narratives of the new elites are not accepted by huge numbers of ordinary people.

This is the real resistance. Not the upper-middle-class TikTok revolutionaries and antifa fantasists whose every view – on trans issues, Black Lives Matter, the wickedness of Trump – corresponds precisely with the outlook of Google and Nike and the New York Times. No, the resistance is these working people. These defiant Hispanics. Those black men who did what black men are not supposed to do. Those non-college whites who think college ideologies are crazy. These people are the ones who have the balls and the independence of mind to force a serious rethink and realignment of the political sphere in the 21st-century West. More power to them.

 

Brendan O’Neill is editor of spiked and host of the spiked podcast, The Brendan O’Neill Show. Subscribe to the podcast here. And find Brendan on Instagram: @burntoakboy

Pictures by: Getty.

Biden and His Hindu VP Give Nod For Covid Task Force To Anti-Redneck Hindu Doctor

[SEE: Obama Finds the Man Most Eager To Initiate Govt. Behavioral Control and Makes Him Surgeon Gen.]

Members of President-elect Biden’s coronavirus task force

–Source: Joe Biden-Kamala Harris transition team. —

FILE – In this Feb. 4, 2014, photo, then U.S. Surgeon General appointee Dr. Vivek Murthy appears on Capitol Hill in Washington. Murthy has been named as co-chair by President-elect Joe Biden to his COVID-19 advisory board. (AP Photo/Charles Dharapak, File)

President-elect Joe Biden on Monday named the members of a team of public health and science experts to develop a blueprint for fighting the coronavirus.

A look at the members:

Dr. David Kessler, co-chair. Professor of pediatrics and epidemiology and biostatistics at the University of California, San Francisco, U.S. Food and Drug Administration commissioner from 1990 to 1997.

Dr. Vivek Murthy, co-chair. U.S. surgeon general from 2014-17, who commanded public health force that dealt with Ebola, Zika and Flint water crisis.

Dr. Marcella Nunez-Smith, co-chair. Associate professor of internal medicine, public health and management at Yale University and associate dean for health equity research at Yale’s medical school specializing in health care for marginalized populations.

Dr. Rick Bright. Immunologist, virologist. Ousted as head of the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority after criticizing the federal government’s response to the coronavirus under President Donald Trump. Bright filed a whistleblower complaint alleging he was reassigned to a lesser job because he resisted political pressure to allow widespread use of hydroxychloroquine, a malaria drug Trump pushed as a COVID-19 treatment.

Dr. Luciana Borio. Vice president of technical staff at the In-Q-Tel strategic investment firm who until last year was a biodefense specialist on the National Security Council.

Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel. Oncologist and chair of the Department of Medical Ethics and Health Policy at the University of Pennsylvania who since 1997 has served as chair of the Department of Bioethics at The Clinical Center of the National Institutes of Health.

Dr. Atul Gawande. Professor of surgery at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and at Harvard Medical School who served as a senior adviser in the Department of Health and Human Services in the Clinton administration.

Dr. Celine Gounder. Clinical assistant professor at the NYU Grossman School of Medicine who served as assistant commissioner and director of the Bureau of Tuberculosis Control at New York City’s Department of Health and Mental Hygiene.

Dr. Julie Morita. Executive vice president of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation who helped lead Chicago’s Department of Public Health for nearly 20 years.

Michael Osterholm. Director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota, former science envoy for health security for the State Department.

Ms. Loyce Pace. Executive director and president of the Global Health Council, who previously served in leadership positions at the American Cancer Society.

Dr. Robert Rodriguez. Professor of emergency medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, School of Medicine.

Dr. Eric Goosby. Infectious disease expert and professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, School of Medicine who during the Clinton administration was the founding director of the largest federally funded HIV/AIDS program.

Biden Won Because He Wasn’t Trump…no other reason

[Both the Democrats and their subservient media set out to sabotage every Trump move since before his first day in office. Obama and Hillary dedicated a team of State Dept. lawyers to investigate the new president and begin impeachment proceedings against him before the Dems left office. The majority of Biden supporters DID NOT vote for him because of anything he proposed, they merely voted for Biden because he wasn’t Trump. They voted for Creepy Joe because he wasn’t Trump…period.]

Buttigieg: Republican Senate would ‘defy the American people’ by opposing Biden agenda

Control of the Senate is on the line in two runoff races in Georgia, with two other Senate races undecided

By Ronn Blitzer

Biden transition team member Pete Buttigieg said Sunday that even if they win enough races to maintain control of the Senate, Republicans would be opposing the will of the American people if they stand in the way of President-elect Joe Biden‘s agenda.

In an appearance on “Fox News Sunday,” Buttigieg admitted that the federal government has – “for better or for worse” – a system of checks and balances where Senate leadership could “disagree with a majority of the American people.” He said that if a Republican Senate used their power to place a check on a Democratic White House, they would be holding back what the people want.

ALL EYES ON CRUCIAL GEORGIA SENATE RACES, WITH POWER IN DC AT STAKE

“At the end of the day the thing we have going for us is the American people are with us,” Buttigieg said, claiming that the Senate would be run by “minority rule” if Republicans block Democrat initiatives such as tax hikes and a public health care option.” He said it’s up to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky.

“Mitch McConnell’s going to have a decision to make. Is his purpose in Washington to defy the American people who, along with the president and the House of Representatives, will believe in expanding and not taking away health care,” Buttigieg said, “whether he wants to help move this country forward and influence progress or whether he wants to stop progress.”

In terms of the immediate future, Buttigieg touted Biden’s desire to hit the ground running in tackling the coronavirus pandemic. Biden is expected to announce his task force on Monday. Whether or not Biden takes any additional action before Inauguration Day remains to be seen.

HOW THE REPUBLICANS MAY HAVE SAVED THEIR SENATE MAJORITY

“Well, he’ll decide on the best course of action,” Buttigieg said. He added that Biden will also “have to make a decision” regarding whether or not to get involved in negotiations with Congress over coronavirus relief legislation that has stalled for months.

“I think we all hope that that logjam in Washington comes to an end,” Buttigieg said.

The former South Bend, Ind., mayor was ultimately optimistic about a Biden administration, claiming that despite political differences, Biden shares common goals with people on both sides of the aisle.

“What Joe Biden wants for the country is what most Americans believe is right for the country,” he said.

Sec/State Pompous Legitimizes Another Terrorist Jihadi Group

[Trump has just de-designated another Islamist terrorist group, the Turkistan Islamic Party (TIP). This is just the latest terror group to be white-washed by Washington before being enlisted to be used to commit terrorism for us. It seems that it isn’t a group’s violent attacks upon civilians that makes it a “terrorist organization”, but whether the attacks upon civilians are done for us or to us.  You see, it was never really a “war against terrorism”, but a war to secretly use terrorism against America’s adversaries.  Other former de-designated terrorist outfits, now serving the American Empire in political or non-violent ways, are the KLA (SEE: “KOSOVO LIBERATION ARMY” Freedom Fighters or… ) and the MEK (Mujahedin-e Khalq) . ]

US’ seal of approval for jihadist terrorist group is designed to cause chaos and unrest in China

FILE PHOTO: A frame from a video purportedly from the Turkistan Islamic Party (TIP), taken from the Internet, shows a man speaks in front of a black banner ©  Reuters

Tom Fowdy is a British writer and analyst of politics and international relations with a primary focus on East Asia.

 

Mike Pompeo has decided that after 18 years, the violent East Turkistan Islamic Movement should no longer be considered a terrorist group – a move calculated to bring trouble to China’s Xinjiang Autonomous Region.

Whilst the world is distracted by the ongoing drama of the US presidential election, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was at work on Thursday making a very subtle, yet significant move.

He quietly announced to the United States Federal Register that the US had de-designated the East Turkistan Islamic Movement (ETIM) as a terrorist organization.

 

ETIM is a Uyghur jihadist group which advocates independence for China’s Xinjiang Autonomous Region. It was listed as a terrorist organization by the US for 18 years, as well as having been blacklisted by the United Nations Security Council for links to Al-Qaeda, the Taliban and Islamic State (IS, formerly ISIS).

And it has been linked with numerous terrorist attacks within Xinjiang itself, as well as providing members who participated alongside Islamists in the Syrian Civil War.

The move by Pompeo is subtle, but significant and inherently political. It follows a long-established pattern of US foreign policymakers defining what constitutes a ‘terrorist’ – and what does not – in accordance with geopolitical preferences. Now, as it looks like Pompeo might end up leaving office, he’s seeking to leave a legacy which makes life difficult for China. The long-term goal? To potentially transform Xinjiang into ‘China’s Afghanistan’ and purposefully incite unrest in the region.

ALSO ON RT.COMQuadruple trouble for China? Why Washington’s hopes of creating an anti-Beijing NATO-style bloc in the region is a pipe dream

Xinjiang has been an increasing focus of Pompeo and US foreign policy as of late. America has sought to push a broader narrative that China is imprisoning over one million Uyghurs, a Muslim minority group, in a re-education system that has been likened to concentration camps. It has accused China of severe human rights abuses and oppression.

While Beijing admits to the existence of these facilities, it argues their purpose is to facilitate counter-terrorism in the region and calls them ‘vocational training centers’, a claim which has drawn plenty of skepticism. Either way, it is quite obvious that the issue is being weaponized in order to manufacture consent for a US-led confrontation of China.

And herein lies the subjective debate as to what constitutes ‘terrorism’ and what does not. As the saying goes “one man’s freedom fighter is another man’s terrorist,” and never has that been more true than with the US, which happily interchanges the label as it wishes to push its political agenda.

For example, the Mujahideen fighters the US pitted against the USSR in Afghanistan were called ‘freedom fighters’, until of course they turned against America itself and played an instrumental role in the horror of 9/11, at which point they became terrorists.

North Korea is listed as a “state sponsor of terrorism” despite the fact it has no involvement with terrorism at all. Sudan was listed too, until it agreed to recognize Israel and then suddenly it wasn’t.

Likewise, Pompeo goes around the world demanding groups funded by Iran, such as Hezbollah, be described as terrorist organizations. But ETIM is apparently now acceptable, despite its UN blacklisting and association with a number of other groups the US considers to be terrorists.

ALSO ON RT.COMAs bodies mount up in terrorist attacks, Europe must realise Islam itself is not the problem but how & why people get radicalised

The change in terminology for geopolitical motivations could not be more obvious and will now clearly be used to China’s detriment. And the implications are as follows: the US will no longer place sanctions on the group, crack down on its members (who have previously been detained in Guantanamo Bay) or blacklist it from the financial system. This will allow ETIM to have an effective ‘safe haven’ in the US where its members can seek political refuge, pool resources and evade Beijing’s influence.

The US hopes the long-term strategic goal to potentially encourage unrest and insurrection in Xinjiang itself will ultimately promote opposition to the Chinese Communist Party, which Pompeo frames as a cause for freedom and liberation.

It’s a reversal of nearly two decades of American foreign policy and a perfect example of what constitutes ‘terrorism’ shifting for strategic ends. After all, this is a region that is a geographic cornerstone of China’s Belt and Road initiative and the country’s main route into greater Eurasia, connecting it to the south with the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor into the Indian Ocean and to the north with Russia and Kazakhstan.

Why would Pompeo stifle a group whose primary focus is China itself? As the clock ticks on his own term in office, he’s just made a decision that could have long-term and far-reaching consequences.

The Democrats’ Favorite KLA Terrorist Leader Thaci Indicted For US-Supported War Crimes In Serbia

[SEE: “KOSOVO LIBERATION ARMY”
Freedom Fighters or… ]

[Former KLA terrorist leader Thaci thrilling US Sec/State Albright to a state of ecstasy.–(SEE: Secretary of State’s Love Affair with Kosovo Liberation Army )]

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton with former leader of the KLA and “Prime Minister” of Kosovo

US Vice-President Jo Biden looks deeply into former KLA terrorist leader Thaci’s eyes.

 

“The 1999 NATO bombing campaign against Yugoslavia had the dubious distinction of being the first time NATO aligned itself with a terrorist organization fighting an insurgency
against a sovereign state. Defying the UN Security Council, the United States and its allies bombed the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia for 78 days, providing vital air support for the Kosovo Liberation Army. The result of this open for support for the KLA has helped to encourage ethnic Albanian separatists to use terrorism to start insurgencies in Serbia’s Presevo Valley and neighboring Macedonia. Furthermore, separatist terror groups in the Chechnya and Turkey have been emboldened to continue their respective campaigns as a result of Western support for Kosovo’s unilateral declaration of independence in February, 2008. To discourage the Kosovo precedent from continuing, it is crucial that NATO member states do not repeat the mistakes made in Kosovo and never again support terrorist insurgencies.”—NATO and the KLA: How the West Encouraged Terrorism

Photo: BIRN.

Special Court accuses President Thaci of war crimes

The Special Prosecution Office in the Hague have announced that a ten-count indictment has been filed against Kosovo President Hashim Thaci and PDK leader Kadri Veseli, accusing them of criminal responsibility for nearly 100 murders.

On Wednesday, the Special Prosecution Office, SPO, in the Hague announced its intention to indict Kosovo President Hashim Thaci and former Speaker of the Assembly, Kadri Veseli, alongside other unnamed individuals, with ten counts of crimes against humanity and war crimes.

The SPO stated that it filed an indictment to be reviewed by the Pretrial Chamber of the Court on April 24, charging Thaci and Veseli with “crimes against humanity and war crimes, including murder, enforced disappearance of persons, persecution, and torture.”

According to a press release issued by Kosovo Specialist Chambers, KCS, on Wednesday, the allegations contained in the indictment would hold Thaci and Veseli criminally responsible for nearly 100 murders. “The crimes alleged in the indictment involve hundreds of known victims of Kosovo Albanian, Serb, Roma, and other ethnicities and include political opponents,” it states.

While the charges are yet to be approved by the Pretrial Chamber, the Special Prosecutor “deemed it necessary” to publicise the suspects of the indictment as a result of “repeated efforts by Hashim Thaci and Kadri Veseli to obstruct and undermine the work of the KSC.”

According to the press release issued on Wednesday, the Court believes that the president and the former speaker have been involved in a “secret campaign” attempting to obstruct the work of the court to ensure that they do not face justice.

“By taking these actions, Mr Thaci and Mr Veseli have put their personal interests ahead of the victims of their crimes, the rule of law, and all people of Kosovo,” the press release states.

Is Social Media Leading Us to Civil War?

Maria Gutzeit

Civil war. That’s what one tech industry executive said he fears most, if we don’t curtail our social media habit. This was in the documentary “Social Dilemma” available on Netflix.

As of last year, 72% of U.S. adults used social media regularly. Facebook is the most popular, and 74% of its users log on daily. From civil war down to a lack of tolerance, the movie concludes social media has set us on a bad path.

I agree.

The scariest part of the film “Social Dilemma” was the explanation of the algorithms designed to keep you coming back.

Essentially, the system can tell what posts you engage the most with…. reading or watching the longest. And it feeds you more of that and less of other things.

This is all done without human oversight.

What gets you amped up on social media? Often it’s something just a little more inflammatory, a little more over the top, than, say, a measured news article that lists pros and cons on both sides. You read those “more exciting” things and you get more of them fed to you.

Another good tidbit from the film was the answer to the question, “How do those people believe all that silly stuff?”

Whether about Donald Trump or Hilary Clinton or Pizza gate or the WhatsApp scandals that led to murders of innocent people, fake news comes to those who consume it, and crowds out anything less exciting, i.e. more reality-based.

Social media trails only our local newspaper, The Signal, as being cited as a source of information in professional surveys done locally. Can you imagine what happens in areas that do not have local news coverage? That is how “those people” believe “all that silly stuff.”

One-sided information is all the vast majority of people see. That is not good for our world.

Government action and overall progress requires cooperation from many different interest groups for anything to succeed.

Gov. Gavin Newsom recently announced his goal of ending the sale of fossil-fuel-powered cars in California by 2035. In the face of climate change, stretch goals like this are important.

However, to have a hope of success, goals need to have buy-in from other people. Within days of the announcement, a Latino group took out a full-page ad in the Los Angeles Times saying the measure would adversely affect low-income and agricultural workers.

There’s talk of electrifying our home appliances, too. More costs for people barely making it. Our power grid and power supply seem to be right on the edge now, and curtailments like we saw in the last heat wave are expected to happen more often.

That, too, has to be fixed if we need to rely even more on electricity. These are discussion points that need to be resolved, yet the battles of social media leave out anything but black and white.

The question really isn’t “do you believe in climate change?”

The bigger question is, can we work together to fix things?

What is equally important is recognizing that China produces double the greenhouse gases that the United States does, and their air pollution even reaches the West Coast of the U.S. India is just behind the U.S.

On a per-capita basis, countries such as Kuwait, Belize, Australia, Libya and even Luxembourg produced more greenhouse gas than the United States as of 2013 (more updated accounting is supposed to start in 2024). I certainly hope sharing and funding efficiencies in other countries is on the table as well.

As much as we like to start at home, tackling the big problems on a worldwide scale is going to help us more than making a farm worker change out their natural gas clothes dryer. This is but one action item in a sea of many that our leaders need to tackle. The solutions are not binary nor are they simple.

Social media essentially makes us decide, with our attention, what is important and what is correct. It does this by feeding us biased information, all day long. This lessens our ability and our understanding of how complex problems are, making us intolerant and cranky when it seems nothing is improving.

In reality, many smart people are working every day to make things better. I’d like to hear more about that and less about fighting over every topic. The real world isn’t social media, but we seem to forget that a little too much lately, at our peril.

Maria Gutzeit is a chemical engineer, business owner, elected official, and mom living in Santa Clarita. “Democratic Voices” appears Tuesdays and rotates among local Democrats.